The whole of Rogozhin's crew, with noise, clatter, and shouting, raced through the rooms to the exit, following Rogozhin and Nastasya Filippovna.
In the reception room the maids gave her her fur coat; the cook Marfa came running from the kitchen.
Nastasya Filippovna kissed them all.
"Can it be, dearest lady, that you're leaving us for good?
But where will you go?
And on such a day, on your birthday!" the tearful maids asked, weeping and kissing her hands.
"I'll go to the street, Katya, you heard, that's the place for me, or else I'll become a washerwoman!
Enough of Afanasy Ivanovich!
Give him my regards, and don't think ill of me . . ."
The prince rushed headlong for the front gate, where they were all getting into four troikas with little bells.
The general overtook him on the stairs.
"Good heavens, Prince, come to your senses!" he said, seizing him by the arm. "Drop it!
You see what she's like!
I'm speaking as a father . . ."
The prince looked at him, but, without saying a word, broke away and ran downstairs.
At the front gate, from which the troikas had just driven off, the general saw the prince catch the first cab and shout, "To Ekaterinhof, follow those troikas!"
Then the general's little gray trotter pulled up and took the general home, along with his new hopes and calculations and the aforementioned pearls, which the general had all the same not forgotten to take with him.
Amidst his calculations there also flashed once or twice the seductive image of Nastasya Filippovna; the general sighed:
"A pity!
A real pity!
A lost woman!
A madwoman! . . .
Well, sir, but what the prince needs now is not Nastasya Filippovna . . ."
A few moralizing and admonishing words of the same sort were also uttered by two other interlocutors from among Nastasya Filippovna's guests, who had decided to go a little way on foot.
"You know, Afanasy Ivanovich, they say something of the sort exists among the Japanese," Ivan Petrovich Ptitsyn was saying. "An offended man there supposedly goes to the offender and says to him: 'You have offended me, for that I have come to rip my belly open before your eyes,' and with those words he actually rips his belly open before his offender's eyes, no doubt feeling an extreme satisfaction, as if he had indeed revenged himself.
There are strange characters in the world, Afanasy Ivanovich!"
"And you think it was something of that sort here, too?" replied Afanasy Ivanovich with a smile. "Hm!
Anyhow, you've wittily . . . and the comparison is excellent.
You saw for yourself, however, my dearest Ivan Petrovich, that I did all I could; I cannot do the impossible, wouldn't you agree?
You must also agree, however, that there are some capital virtues in this woman . . . brilliant features.
I even wanted to cry out to her just now, if only I could have allowed myself to do it in that bedlam, that she herself was my best defense against all her accusations.
Well, who wouldn't be captivated by this woman on occasion to the point of forgetting all reason . . . and the rest?
Look, that boor Rogozhin came lugging a hundred thousand to her!
Let's say everything that happened there tonight was ephemeral, romantic, indecent, but, on the other hand, it was colorful, it was original, you must agree.
God, what might have come from such a character and with such beauty!
But, despite all my efforts, even education—all is lost!
A diamond in the rough—I've said it many times . . ."
And Afanasy Ivanovich sighed deeply.
PART TWO
I
A couple of days after the strange adventure at Nastasya Filippovna's party, with which we ended the first part of our story, Prince Myshkin hastened to leave for Moscow on the business of receiving his unexpected inheritance.
It was said then that there might have been other reasons for such a hasty departure; but of that, as well as of the prince's adventures in Moscow and generally in the course of his absence from Petersburg, we can supply very little information.
The prince was away for exactly six months, and even those who had certain reasons to be interested in his fate could find out very little about him during all that time.
True, some sort of rumors reached some of them, though very rarely, but these were mostly strange and almost always contradicted each other.
The greatest interest in the prince was shown, of course, in the house of the Epanchins, to whom he had even had no time to say good-bye as he was leaving.
The general, however, had seen him then, even two or three times; they had discussed something seriously.
But if Epanchin himself had seen him, he had not informed his family of it.
And, generally, at first, that is, for nearly a whole month after the prince's departure, talk of him was avoided in the Epanchins' house.
Only the general's wife, Lizaveta Prokofyevna, voiced her opinion at the very beginning, "that she had been sadly mistaken about the prince."
Then after two or three days she added, though without mentioning the prince now, but vaguely, that "the chiefest feature of her life was to be constantly mistaken about people."